Robert Gates exit from Pentagon is bad news for Pak: US think tank

WASHINGTON: Departure of Robert Gates as the US Defence Secretary, after more than four and half years of leading the Pentagon, is bad news for Pakistan, a top US counter-terror analyst has said.

"The departure of Gates and the arrival of Panetta who's going to bring with him the new CIA view I think is bad news for Pakistan," Bruce Riedel of the prestigious Brookings Institute, said last week participating in a discussion at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank.

Riedel added that this will leave the State Department as the principle defender of engagement with Pakistan and the state department, because it is the State Department, argues in favour of engagement with everybody. "That's what diplomats are supposed to do. Its track record of winning those debates not just in this administration but in every administration is pretty slim," he said.

"It may have engagement but it's engagement often with nothing inside of it. So my reading of the tea leaves is that not only does events on the ground argue that this relationship's going to get worse, bureaucratic changes and personnel changes in Washington probably will add to that tendency towards getting worse," Riedel said giving his impression of the things to come.

Riedel said that the highest levels of this administration never had illusions about Pakistan but they also understand that Pakistan is an important place. "Getting angry with it (Pakistan), getting frustrated with it feels good. But that's not a policy. Anger is not a solution to this problem. The solutions are not very good but anger is the least effective of them," Riedel said, who in 2009 had shaped the Af-Pak policy of the Obama Administration.